God is an Englishman picks up a question that, one expects, will be much discussed in the next few years: is Christianity being wiped off the map of England? If the answer is ‘yes’, the Church of England must take most of the blame. Last year, Justin Welby had to resign as archbishop of Canterbury because of his failure to investigate accusations of child abuse against individuals connected with the Church. When the pandemic struck and many people suddenly felt the need for spiritual comfort, he was too timid to ask Boris Johnson to allow churches to open for prayer. On Easter Sunday 2020, he celebrated (if you can call it that) Holy Communion in his kitchen. Omrani writes: ‘I recently asked an Anglican parish priest if they thought Christianity had anything to contribute to an understanding of English national identity. The reply was no more than pursed lips, a furrowed brow and embarrassed silence.’ The Church of England despises England because its leaders swallow all the claptrap about the unrelieved wickedness of the country’s past actions. Those are the depths to which Anglicanism has sunk.

Whatever happens to the Church of England, Christianity provides many of the landmarks, physical and metaphorical, of English culture and is not going anywhere in a hurry. Omrani, having described how St Augustine brought the religion to England, goes on to outline the institutions it has shaped. Kingship is the first: the crown was formally married to Christianity when the monarch became Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534. Law, too, was shaped by Christian principles, and not merely the Ten Commandments. In an important piece of case law, a judge in 1932 cited a line from the Bible, ‘love thy neighbour’, to allow a woman who had been poisoned by a snail found in a bottle of ginger beer in Paisley to sue the manufacturer.

Omrani goes through the literature that we owe to Christianity, especially the poetry: the writings of John Donne and George Herbert, and perhaps the greatest poem in the English language, Paradise Lost, not to mention the rest of Milton’s oeuvre. Two great works of literature – the King James Bible